How would you solve the boring "damage rotation" of the healers?

[ForsakenRoe]

I dont know if it has been said or not, but another issue with how healers feel like they have nothing to do, is how damage is being dealt to the raid/group.

Can you think of any raid wide that isnt just "Deals a bunch of damage that almost kills everyone" or "Deals a bunch of damage that will kill everyone with the DoT it applies afterward" (not accounting for actually using any mit for these). So of course the way healers NEED to be setup is to counter act this nearly instantly, which i think is really basic, and not engaging at all. Having more damage hitting the raid is not the same as damage hitting the raid more often.

Aside from changing the design direction of how healers should work, to keep healers busy we need encounters that have constant damage throughout the engagement. Now, that could be a light DoT applies for the entirety of the encounter, a heavy DoT that keeps jumping to other players, or a myriad of other ideas for constant or randomly-dealt damage.

Unfortunately, I believe its less likely for how encounters are setup to be changed in the future than it is for how healers are set up in the future. And with FFXIV being a really structured game, especially for boss encounters, the ideas behind how bosses are made are likely to never change.

Yeh, I'm glad a lot of people have praised the format of Barbariccia's healing requirements, lots of small, but VERY fast paced hits, it makes the fight feel frantic, and actually incentivizes the regen power of Pure healers, while keeping Barrier healer's mit relevant because it's always good to reduce the damage you're taking. One of the big problems that two of the healers face (the Pures) is that if a mechanic oneshots you, your extra healing power compared to the Barrier healers means nothing. You can't save people without Mit in that situation, and WHM in particular is distinctly lacking, having only Temperance for AOE mitigation. There's 3 main ways to make a healing check 'harder': hit harder, hit faster, or prevent the player from getting their heals out in some way, and while Barb/BarbEX does the latter two of those very well imo, I've seen it be criticized for using too much of the 'stop player from healing by forcing movement' option, which admittedly does screw over WHM moreso than the other three, but imagine for example, if WHM were to have an extra bankable GCD heal tool (maybe one that stacks up to 2 uses banked), and maybe a damage button that is instantcast so you can keep your damage going more easily while remaining mobile to resolve the mechanics...? What I'm saying is, it's moreso an issue with WHM's kit than the encounter design

I also think it's less likely encounter design would change, than for the jobs to change. Because to shift encounter design, requires looking at all 19 (soon to be 21) jobs, and making sure that whatever change you do to the encounter design, works well for all of those jobs. What might be good for one job (say, a lot of movement which SMN deals well with) might screw over another (RDM can't move as well as SMN can) and so there'd be times where certain jobs have too much struggle and are excluded from PFs. We saw this in HW, with PLD being excluded because it couldn't deal with magic damage so well (and it's damage sucked). Or DRK in SB, because it had no extra mit options to help healers (thanks to SE stealing Reprisal from it and giving it to all tanks). Instead, I think they'd have to do 'what they want encounter design to look like' first, and then redesign all the jobs for that new encounter design. And that means there's a chance that some get left behind in terms of designs. Much easier, I think, to leave encounter design relatively untouched, and instead change the jobs to better suit it. If there's a mechanic where the two ranged (caster/physranged) have to do a whole lot of movement (something like eruption baiting in UWU for example), RDM would have more issues there than a SMN, or a BLM who's able to pool two Triplecasts. So, giving RDM something that helps them to maintain mobility (like making Reprise suck less) would allow for that mechanic to exist, instead of 'well we can't really do it because RDM would have trouble with it', or SE's apparent preferred solution, 'just put it in and if RDM struggles with it, lol lmao'

In healer terms, that'd be something like 'change how much healing is required in all content' vs 'add a couple more buttons to the damage rotation to flesh out downtime activity a bit'. The first can work, but it's a massive undertaking and it still wouldn't address the downtime, just make there be a little less of it. And how much less is dependent entirely on the skill level of the player, and the skill level expected by the content difficulty. That is, I'd assume that SE would not be boosting the EX roulette requirements to the point where someone like me would find the healing requirements high enough to be engaging on their own merit. So it doesn't really solve the problem I have, of 'EX roulette is kinda boring'. A combination, of 'healing requirements are increased (but not by as much as if it was the only adjustment), AND we have a bit more damage options in the downtimes (but not as many as if it was the only adjustment)' is probably the solution that appeals to the most people. Or more likely, the overwhelming majority of the healer players are in the middle camp of 'oh this is what changed, ok' and they just get on with it. No overwhelming like, no vehement dislike, just 'oh ok cool' and an understanding that 'this is the new normal for this expansion'.

The first step to that though, would be to at least increase healing requirements in EX roulette to the point that we have to use at least one GCD in the whole run (or in WHM's case, a non-Lily GCD), and even that amount of increased healing might cause issues. I've seen a couple 'healbot' players in EX roulette, only using Cure/Cure2 etc, who absolutely fell apart when I did a wall-to-wall pull, because they panicked at the extra incoming damage and didn't know what to do. They've never had to deal with a high-healing-required situation (it's not high, but it's 'high by comparison to what they are used to'), so when they're suddenly thrown into the deep end they can't tread water and start to sink

[Aravell]

I also think it's less likely encounter design would change, than for the jobs to change. Because to shift encounter design, requires looking at all 19 (soon to be 21) jobs, and making sure that whatever change you do to the encounter design, works well for all of those jobs. What might be good for one job (say, a lot of movement which SMN deals well with) might screw over another (RDM can't move as well as SMN can) and so there'd be times where certain jobs have too much struggle and are excluded from PFs. We saw this in HW, with PLD being excluded because it couldn't deal with magic damage so well (and it's damage sucked). Or DRK in SB, because it had no extra mit options to help healers (thanks to SE stealing Reprisal from it and giving it to all tanks). Instead, I think they'd have to do 'what they want encounter design to look like' first, and then redesign all the jobs for that new encounter design. And that means there's a chance that some get left behind in terms of designs. Much easier, I think, to leave encounter design relatively untouched, and instead change the jobs to better suit it. If there's a mechanic where the two ranged (caster/physranged) have to do a whole lot of movement (something like eruption baiting in UWU for example), RDM would have more issues there than a SMN, or a BLM who's able to pool two Triplecasts. So, giving RDM something that helps them to maintain mobility (like making Reprise suck less) would allow for that mechanic to exist, instead of 'well we can't really do it because RDM would have trouble with it', or SE's apparent preferred solution, 'just put it in and if RDM struggles with it, lol lmao'

Tbf, fights like UWU back in SB were more freeform with multiple ways to solve things. When we did UWU and we had a RDM, I baited eruptions with the p.ranged as a SCH, since while Ruin II is a loss, it's not as big a loss as RDM running and doing nothing. Let's take O8S for example as well, healers do absolutely nothing but heal on Forsaken 1, so a good healer can substitute for any mechanic that a DPS player misses.

Fights that are more freeform like that would benefit RDM greatly, since a good healer can do their mechanic instead of forcing them to take a damage loss. They just need to dispense with the idea of dance mechanics being the only way to design fights, if the healer has to dance with the rest of the party, the opportunities for recovery becomes slimmer and there's less creative ways to mitigate party damage loss. It's probably part of why people view TEA as more unforgiving than, say, UWU or UCoB, because TEA requires the healer to dance as well (so does UCoB, to a lesser extent, but you have some opportunities for recovery there).